Battlefield 4 servers upgraded to fix rubber-banding bug

Battlefield 4's rubber-banding issues, introduced since the release of the Naval Strike DLC, should be over with DICE's new server upgrades.

Developer DICE has announced what it claims is the solution to rubber-banding issues plaguing Battlefield 4 players, with the introduction of new server hardware more suited to the task.

Battlefield 4, the latest in the company's first-person shooter franchise, hasn't had an easy ride since launch. First, it was the victim of a DDoS attack that downed the multiplayer servers; next, bugs began to mount to the extent that all other projects were put on hold until DICE could resolve the issues; investors, unimpressed with the critical reception of the buggy title, responded with a lawsuit; and the planned patch to add support for AMD's Mantle API was delayed at the last minute.

The company has described fixing issues still extant in the network coding of the game, causing numerous multiplayer issues, as a top prority, but the release of the Naval Strike downloadable content (DLC) pack introduced yet another problem: rubber banding, whereby players would appear to be bullet sponges, or even reflect an enemies damage back at them. That, the company claims, should no longer be a problem.

'As you know, we’ve been looking into resolving the “rubber banding” that some players on certain platforms have experienced with Battlefield 4 after the recent release of Naval Strike,' explained DICE's Karl Magnus Troedsson in an update to players today. ' We’ve found that the root cause of the issue was a configuration of certain hardware types dedicated to 64-player matches. We have invested in new hardware to resolve this issue and deployed new higher-performance servers this week.

'In preparation, we conducted a significant amount of testing before installing the new servers to ensure they would correct the issue. We are already seeing performance improvement with 64-player matches and expect this to continue,' continued Troedsson. 'While the process took longer than we would’ve liked, we wanted to be 100 per cent sure it was done right and that the long-term solution was properly in place.'